


dollhouse

by latinacap



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brother-Sister Relationships, Child Murder, Dark fic, Detective Steve, Gen, Geographical Isolation, Graphic Description of Corpses, Homophobia, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Animal Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Inspired by Sharp Objects, Journalist Bucky, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Institutions, Mystery, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Self-Harm, Sexism, Thriller, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Verbal Abuse, graphic description of violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-23 09:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21318241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/latinacap/pseuds/latinacap
Summary: Bucky Barnes, a reporter fresh from a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital, must return to his tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls while staying with his hypochondriac mother and estranged half-sister. Trying to put together a psychological puzzle from his past, Bucky finds himself identifying with the young victims a bit too closely.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Rebecca Barnes Proctor, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There I am, with three wips and posting another Gillian Flynn AU for no one but myself and like two people aouhauirhtuih
> 
> **REMEMBER/WARNING** The themes of this book are very graph and violent with lots of unconventional things happening. I'm trying to soften it as much as possible, but somethings have to remain the same to make sense in the overall storyline. 
> 
> Enjoy!

### VANISH

* * *

The thread from Bucky’s sweater was starting to make his skin crawl. The fabric was itchy and new, grabbed from a discount bin at a second-hand store that may or may not have been washed before being thrown in. Normally, Bucky wouldn’t bother buying any new articles of clothing since he had an entire box dedicated to winter clothes, but it was May 12th and the temperature suddenly dropped a whopping twenty degrees which in turn, forced the brunette to grab something quick. Anything other than dig through the box with energy he didn’t have. 

The thread — long, curved, and a deep red — laid lazily on his wrist and made it look like a small, thin line of a cut with dried blood. Just a paper cut, maybe. Or a hasty cut made by one of the neighborhood cats that Bucky liked to pet on his way to the liquor store just a block from his shabby apartment. His skin started to scream, then, so he decided to shake his head and lean back against the creaky plastic of his chair. 

His cubicle was open yet suffocating. Three walls with a wide gap to peer out at his coworkers typing away on keyboards that looked to be almost older than the building. A poster of a piglet cuddling a chick caught his eye from the cubicle directly in front of his, and he flinched at the thought of pork and the squeals that premeditated it. His skin still felt hot. 

He shook his head, clearing his throat, and turned back to the opened Word document on his screen. The story of the day was a limp sort of evil. Four kids, ages two through six, were found locked in a room on the South Side with a couple of tuna sandwiches and a quart of milk. They’d been left three days, flurrying like chickens over the food and feces on the carpet. Their mother has wandered off for a suck on the pipe and just … forgotten. Sometimes that’s what happens. No cigarette burns, no bone snaps. Just an irretrievable slipping. Bucky had seen the mother after the arrest, even going as far as finding her Instagram: twenty-two year old Tammy Davis, blonde and fat, with pink rouge on her cheeks in two sloppy circles the size of shot glasses. Her entire feed was full of pictures of her in fishnets and bodycon dresses, taken in poorly lit clubs and dirty mirrors that were almost exclusively found at college dorms. No pictures of the kids whatsoever. He imagined her sitting on a stained sofa, her lips on that metal, a sharp burst of smoke. Then all was fast floating, her kids just background noise, as she shot back to junior high, when the boys still cared and she was the prettiest, a glossy-lipped thirteen-year old who mouthed cinnamon sticks before she kissed. 

A belly. A smell. Cigarettes and stale coffee. His editor, esteemed, weary Timothy Dugan — but please, call him _Dugan_ — rocking back in his cracked Hush Puppies. His thick red mustache was soaked in brown tobacco saliva. “Where are you on the story, kiddo?” he asked, pulling his slacks up higher than they were really allowing to go. 

“Almost done,” He had three inches of copy. He needed ten. 

“Good. Fuck her, file it, and then come to my office,”

“I can come now,”

“_ Fuck _ her, _ file _it, and then come to my office,”

“Fine. Ten minutes,” the pants fell back down. 

He nodded in agreement, pat the top of his cubicle loudly, then walked off. 

“Jimmy?” 

“Yes, Dugan?” 

“Fuck her,” 

Timothy Dugan thinks he’s a soft touch. Might be because he was openly gay. Might be because he’s a soft touch. 

* * *

Dugan’s office was on the third floor. Bucky was sure he got panicky-pissed every time he looked out the window and saw the trunk of a tree. _ Good _ editors didn’t see bark; they saw leaves — if they can even make out trees from up on the twentieth, thirtieth floor. But for the _Daily Post_, fourth-largest paper in Chicago, relegated to the suburbs, there’s room to sprawl. Three floors will do, spreading relentlessly outward like a spill, unnoticed among the carpet retailers and lamp shops. A corporate developer produced our township over three well-organized years — 1961-64— then named it after his daughter, who’d suffered a serious equestrian accident a month before the job was finished. Aurora Springs, he ordered, pausing for a photo by a brand-new city sign. Then he took his family and left. The daughter, now in her late sixties and fine except for an occasional tingling in her arms, lived in Florida and returned every few years to take a photo by her namesake sign, just like Pop, then ran out as fast as she could. 

Bucky wrote the story on her last visit. He remembered how Dugan sneered at it, barely looking the young man in the face as he crumpled up the copy. It was nothing personal. Dugan hated most slice-of-life pieces. He got smashed off old Chambord while he read it, leaving his office smelling like raspberries. Dugan gets drunk fairly quietly, but often. It’s not the reason, though, that he has such a cozy view of the ground. That’s just yawing bad luck. 

Bucky walked in and shut the door to Dugan’s office, which wasn’t at all what he imagined his editor’s office would look. He always pictured big oak panels, a window pane in the door — a flashy and elegant nameplate marked Chief — so the cub reporters could watch him rage over First Amendment rights. Dugan’s office was bland and institutional, save for a few pieces of World War II model airplanes he liked to work on on his days off. A couple of biographies and nonfiction Army memoirs hidden among all the other hardcover books that every journalist seemed to own. Well, everyone except Bucky. He wasn’t a very good journalist. 

“Tell me about Wind Gap,” Dugan crossed his fingers over his belly, tapping his thumbs against the tweed of his sport’s coat. Bucky scratched as his elbow at the mere sight of the smothering fabric. 

“It’s at the very bottom of Indiana, in the tail. Practically at an intersection with Illinois and Kentucky,” he said, spewing whatever facts about Indiana that came up from the top of his head. Should he have mentioned the state’s baseball team or the meaning of the state flag? Dugan loved to drill reporters on any topic he deemed pertinent — the number of murders in Chicago last year, the demographics for Cook County, or, for some reason, the story of Bucky’s hometown, a topic he would very much rather avoid. “It’s been around since before the Civil War,” he continued, “It barely counts as being a part of the Bible Belt, but likes to think of it as the heart of it. It’s biggest business is hog butchering. About two thousand people live there. Old money and trash,”

“Which are you?”

“I’m trash. From old money. Trash in a gold bag, in you will,” He smiled. Dugan frowned. 

“And what the hell is going on?” 

Bucky sat silent, his brain clicking through the various disasters that might have befallen Wind Gap like an old slide projector. It’s one of those crummy towns prone to misery: A bus collision or a twister. An explosion at the silo or a toddler down a well. He was also sulking a bit. He’d hoped — as he always does when Dugan calls him to his office — that he was going to compliment him on a recent piece, promote him to a better beat, hell, maybe even slide over a slip of paper with a 1% raise crawled on it — but he was unprepared to chat about the current exciting events in Wind Gap. 

“Your mom’s still there, right, Jimmy?” 

“Mom. Stepdad,” A half sister born when he was in high school, her existence so unreal to him he often forgot her name. Becca. And then Camille, always long-gone Camille. 

“Well dammit, you ever talk to them?” Not since Christmas: a limp, polite phone call after administering three bourbons on his part. He worried his mother could smell it through the phone lines. 

“Not recently, no,” 

“Jesus Christ, Barnes, read the wires sometime. I guess there was a murder last August? Little girl strangled?”

He nodded like he knew what Dugan was talking about. He was lying. His mother was the only person in Wind Gap with whom he’s had even a limited connection, and she never even mentioned it in her six-times-a-year texts. Curious. 

“Now another one’s missing. Sounds like it might be a serial, ya know? Same age, same hair color. Drive over there and get me the story. Hurry. We have to get the story before those other fuckers get a whiff. Be there by tomorrow morning,”

No fucking way. “I don’t understand. We have horror stories here, Dugan,”

“Yeah, and we also have three competitors with twice the staff and cash,” he ran a hand through his hair, which fell into frazzled spikes. “I’m sick of getting slammed out of news. This is our chance to put our name on the map. Breaking something _ huge,” _

Every journalist has a dream. Dugan’s was that one day, they’d get the right story and become the overnight paper of choice in Chicago, gain national credibility. Last year another paper, not them, sent a writer to his hometown somewhere in bumfuck nowhere Texas after a group of teens drowned in the spring floods. He wrote an elegiac but well-reported piece on the nature of water and regret, covered everything from the boys’ basketball team, which lost its three best players, to the local funeral home which was desperately unskilled in cleaning up drowned corpses. The story won a Pulitzer. 

Bucky didn’t care though. No amount of overnight fame could make him want to ever set foot in Wind Gap ever again. He didn’t want to go so bad that he didn’t even notice that he had wrapped his hands around the arms of the chair, as if Dugan might try to bodily force him out of the state. The older man sat and stared at him for a few moments with watery eyes. He cleared his throat loudly, looked at his photo of his wife, and smiled like he was a doctor about to break bad news. Fuck. He knew that look. Dugan was all bark, all smoke to fit his old-school image of an editor — but he was also one of the most decent people Bucky knew. He can practically already smell the stale dry grass of an Indiana spring. 

“Look, kiddo, if you can’t do this, you can’t do it. But I think it might be good for you. Not just career-wise — even though it would _ really _ help — but it might help you flesh some stuff out. Get you back on your feet. It’s a damn good story — we need it. _ You _need it,”

Despite his tough skin, Dugan had always backed him. All the slice-of-life crap that he hated that Bucky wrote, all the disappointed shakes of his head, the brunette never felt like Dugan was going to just drop him. See, he thought that Bucky would turn out to be his best reporter, going as far as saying that he had a surprising mind. In his two years on the job, Bucky had consistently fallen short of expectations. Sometimes strikingly. Now Bucky could feel him across the desk, urging him to give the man a little faith. Bucky breathed in deep, past the pain in his chest from the cold air, and nodded in what he hoped was a confident fashion. 

“I’ll go pack,” his hands left sweat-prints on the chair’s vinyl. 

* * *

He had no pets to worry about, no plants to leave with a neighbor. Into a duffle bag the size of a child ballerina’s, he tucked away enough clothes to last him five days, his own reassurance he’d be out of Wind Gap before a week’s end. As he took a final glance around his place, it revealed itself to him in a rush that left him blinking. The apartment looked like a college kids: cheap, transitory, and mostly uninspired. There were no photos hung up on the walls, or bookshelves filled with books, or even anything close to a personality. Sighing, Bucky promised himself he’d invest in a decent sofa when he returned as a reward for the stunning story he was sure to dig up. What a fucking mess. His idea of a reward was a basic piece of modern decor that even a twenty-two year old addict and mother of four had. Jesus. 

One the table by the door was the only photo he allowed himself to have: a photo of himself as a preteen holding Camille at about age seven. They’re both laughing. She had her bright, blue eyes wide open in surprise, he had his scrunched shut. He was squeezing her into him, her short skinny legs dangling over his knees. He can’t remember the occasion or what they were laughing about. Over the years it’s become a pleasant mystery. He thought that he liked not knowing.

* * *

Bucky takes baths. Not showers. He can’t handle the spray, it gets his skin buzzing, like someone had turned on a switch. He felt like Frankenstein’s monster, jolting under the intensity of Hellfire and moaning in dissatisfaction at the attempt of sparking life into him. Because of this, he wadded a flimsy motel towel over the grate in the shower floor, aimed the nozzle at the wall, and sat in the three inches of water that pooled in the stall. Someone else’s pubic hair floated by. He shot up fast to avoid it from touching it. There was no second towel, so he ran to the bed and blotted himself with the cheap sheet-like blanket. Then he drank warm bourbon out his hydroflask and cursed the ice machine. 

Wind Gap was about eleven hours south of Chicago. Dugan had graciously allowed him a budget for one night’s motel stay and breakfast in the morning, if he ate at a gas station. Bucky figured it was his way of apologizing for sending his ass to Wind Gap, he just wished that his editor felt worst about it. Especially since once he got into town, he was staying at his mother’s. That Dugan decided for him. He already knew the reaction he’d get when he showed up at her door. A quick, shocked flustering, her hand to her hair, a mismatched hug that would leave him aimed slightly to one side with the only contact between them being a barely-touching hand on his shoulder. Talk of the messy house, which wouldn’t even have a drinking glass out of place. A query about length of stay packaged into the niceties. “How long do we get to have you for, sweetness?” she’d say, which was Winifred for: “When do you leave?” 

It’s the politeness that he found most upsetting. 

He knew he should prepare his notes, jot down questions. Instead he drank more bourbon, then popped some aspirin, turned out the light. Lulled by the wet purr of the air conditioner and the electric plinking of some video game next door, he fell asleep. He was only thirty miles outside of his hometown, but he needed one last night away. 

In the morning, he inhaled an old jelly donut and headed south, the temperature shooting up unexpectedly, the lush forest imposing on both sides. That part of Indiana was ominously flat — miles of unmajestic trees broken only by the thin strip of highway he was on. The same scene repeating itself over two minutes. He felt dizzy. 

You can’t spot Wind Gap from a distance; it’s tallest building is only three stories. But after twenty minutes of driving, he knew it was coming: First a gas station popped. A group of scraggly teenage boys sat out front, bare chested and bored. Near an old pickup, a diapered toddler threw fistfuls of gravel in the air as his mother filled up the tank. Her hair was dyed gold, but her brown roots reached almost to her ears. She yelled something to the boys he couldn’t make out as he passed. Soon after, the forest began to thin. He passed scribble of a strip mall with tanning beds, a gun shop, a drapery store. Then came a lonely cul-de-sac of old houses, meant to be part of a development that never happened. And finally, town proper. 

For no good reason, he held his breath as he passed the sign welcoming him to Wind Gap, a vintage depiction of a family riding into town in a convertible with pearly smiles and faded head scarves. It had been eight years since he’d been back, but the scenery was visceral. Head down that road, and he’d find the home of his grade-school piano teacher, a former nun whose breath smelled of eggs. That path led to a tiny park where he smoked his first cigarette on a sweaty summer day. Take that boulevard, and he’d be on his way to Woodberry, and the hospital. 

He decided to head directly to the police station. Might as well get as much work fitted into these five days as he could. You know, get a head start on things. It squatted at one end of Main Street, which is, true to the word, Wind Gap’s main street. On Main Street, you will find a beauty parlor and a hard-ware store, a five-and-dime called Five-and-Dime, and a library twelve shelves deep. You’ll find a clothing store called Candy’s Casuals, in which you may find jumpers, turtlenecks, and sweaters that have ducks and schoolhouses on them. Most nice women in Wind Gap are teachers or mothers or work at places like Candy’s Casuals, which is ironic since the name always reminded Bucky of a stripper with high pigtails and dusty pink platform heels. Hopefully in a few years you may find a Starbucks, which will bring what the town yearns for: prepackaged, pre approved mainstream hipness. For now, though, there’s just a greasy spoon, which is run by a family whore name he couldn’t remember. 

Main Street was empty. No cars, no people. A dog loped down the sidewalk, with no owner calling after it. All the lampposts were papered with yellow ribbons and grainy photocopies of a little girl. He parked so he could peel off one of the flyers, taped crookedly to a stop sign at a child’s height. The sign was homemade, “Missing,” written at the top in bold letters that may have been filled in by Magic Marker. The photo showed a dark-eyed girl with a feral grin and too much hair for her head. The kind of girl who’d be described by teachers as a “handful”. He liked her. 

_ Wanda Magda Maximoff _

_ Age: 10 _

_ Missing since: 5/11 _

_ Last seen at Jacob J. Garrett Park, wearing _

_ blue-jean shorts, red striped T-shirt _

_ Tips: 555-7377 _

He hoped he’d walk into the police station and be informed that Wanda Magda was found already. No harm done. Seems she’s gotten lost or twisted an ankle in the woods or ran away and then thought better of it. He would get in his car and drive back to Chicago and speak to no one ever again. 

Turns out the streets were deserted because half the town was out searching the forest to the north. The station’s receptionist told him he could wait — Chief Chester Phillips would be returning for lunch soon. The waiting room had the false homey feel of a dentist’s office; he sat in an orange end chair and bounced his leg with his thumbnail in his mouth_ . _An air freshener plugged into a nearby outlet hissed out a plastic smell meant to remind him of country breezes. Thirty minutes later, he’d gone through three magazines and was starting to feel sick from the scent. When Phillips finally walked in, the receptionist nodded at him and whispered with eager disdain, “Media.”

Phillips, an average fellow in his mid to late fifties, had already sweated through his uniform. His shirt clung to his chest, and his pants puckered out in the back where an ass should have been. “Media?” he stared at Bucky over looming bifocals. “What media?”

“Chief Phillips, I’m Bucky Barnes. With the _Daily Post_ in Chicago,”

“Chicago? Why are you here from Chicago?”

“I’d like to speak with you about the little girls — Wanda Maximoff and the girl who was murdered last year,”

“Jesus H. Christ. How’d you hear about this up there? Jesus Christ,”

He looked over at the receptionist, then back at him, as if the plump woman behind the desk was in cahoots with the brunette. Then he motioned for him to follow, “Hold my calls, Ruth. This shouldn’t take long,” 

The receptionist rolled her eyes. 

Chester Phillips walked ahead of him down a wood-paneled hallway checked with cheap framed photos of trout and horses, then into his sweltering office. It had no windows, filled to the brim with file cabinets of overspilling documents. He sat down heavily, groaning and sighing once he settled in the chair. His old, weary eyes never left Bucky’s as he reached out on his desk to pick up a cigarette and lit it with two hands cuffed around the flame as if the mere thought of a breeze could snuff it out. Didn’t even offer Bucky one. 

“I don’t want this to get out, young man. I have no intention of letting this leave the town line,” 

“I’m afraid, Chief Phillips, that there’s not much of a choice in the matter. Children are being targeted in your town. The public should be aware,” It’s the line he’d been mouthing on one the drive down like it was a cherry stem. It directed fault to the gods. 

“What do you care? They’re not your kids, they’re Wind Gap kids,” he started to rearrange some loose papers on his desk, though Bucky doubt that they were more important than a spam letter from the bank. “I bet I’m pretty safe in saying Chicago never cared about Wind Gap kids until now,” his voice cracked at the end. Phillips sucked on his cigarette, twisted a chunky gold pinky ring, blinked in quick succession. Bucky wondered if he was going to cry. 

“You’re right. Probably not. Look, this isn’t going to be some sort of exploitative story. It’s important. If it makes you feel any better about this, I’m from Wind Gap myself,” _ There you go, Dugan. I’m trying. _

He looked back at him. Stared at his face from his eyes, to his nose, to his mouth. 

“What’s your name?”

“Bucky Barnes,” 

“Buck … Bucky? What kind of name is that? What’s your God-given name, boy?” 

“Alright. It’s James Barnes,” 

“How do I not know you?”

“Never got in trouble, sir,” Bucky offered a smile, shrugging it off in the hopes that Phillips would just drop it. 

“Your family’s Barnes?” 

“My mother married out of her maiden name about twenty-five years ago. Winifred and George Proctor,”

“Oh. I’m familiar with them,” Everyone was familiar with them. Money was not too common in Wind Gap, not real money. “But I still don’t know who you are, Mr. Barnes. You do this story and from now on, people will know Wind Gap for … this,”

“Maybe some publicity would help,” he offered, “It’s helped countless other cases,”

Phillips was quiet for a second, pondering his paper-bag lunch crumpled at the corner of the desk with the bottom soaked from something that must’ve once been cold. He muttered something about JonBenet and shit. 

“No thanks, Mr. Barnes. And no comment. I have no comment on any ongoing investigations. You can quote me on that in the _ Derry Post _,” 

“_ Daily Post, _” Bucky breathed in harshly, “Look, I have the right to be here. Let’s make this easy. You give me some information, a quote. Something. Then I’ll stay out of your way for a while. I don’t want to make your job harder than it has to be. But I need to do mine,” It was another little exchange he’d thought of somewhere near St. Louis while sipping on vodka from a Fiji water bottle. 

He left the police station with an empty notepad and a photocopied map of Wind Gap on which Chief Phillips had drawn a tiny X to mark where they found the first missing girl’s body a year ago. 

Lila Barton, age nine, was found on August 27th in Falls Creek, a bumpy, noisy waterway that ran through the middle of the North Woods. Since nightfall on the twenty-sixth, when she went missing, a search party had combed the forest. But it was hunters who came across her just after 5 a.m. She’d been strangled close to midnight with a basic clothesline, looped twice around her neck. Then dumped in the creek, which was low from the long summer drought. The clothesline had snagged on a massive rock, and she’d spent the night drifting lifelessly along in the lazy stream. The burial was closed coffin. This was all Phillips would give him. It took an hour of questions to gather all the pieces of information to form the bigger picture. 

* * *

Sitting in his car, Bucky dialed the number on the Missing poster on his cracked phone. An elderly female voice identified it as the Wanda Maximoff Hotline — voice unsettling chirpy for such a grave hotline — but in the background he could hear a dishwasher churning. The woman informed him that so far as she knew, the search was still going on in the North Woods. Those who wanted to help should report to the main access road and bring their own water. Record temperatures were expected. 

At the search site, four blonde girls sat stiffly on a picnic towel spread in the sun with matching roller skates on their feet. They pointed toward one of the trails and told him to keep walking until he found the group.

“What are you doing here?” asked the prettiest. Her flushed face had the roundness of a girl barely in her teens and her hair was parted in ribbons, but her breasts, which she aimed proudly outward, were those of a grown woman. A lucky grown woman. She smiled as if she knew him, impossible since she’d have been a preschooler the last time he was in Wind Gap. She looked familiar, though. Maybe the younger sister of one of his old schoolmates. She smirked cockily at him, giggling and bumping shoulders with the other girls around her. 

“Just here to help,” he replied lamely, looking towards the trees to see if he can spot the group. 

“Right,” she mused, and then dismissed him by turning her attention towards picking off the hot pink nail polish on her short nails. 

Bucky walked off the crunch of the hot gravel and into the forest, which only felt warmer as the heat seeped up past the soles of his sneakers. The air was jungle wet. He gathered the longer hairs from behind his neck, pulling them aside and fanning his neck with the map. Goldenrod and wild sumac bushes brushed his ankles, and fuzzy white cottonwood seeds floated everywhere, slipping into his mouth, sticking to his arms. When he was a kid, Camille called them dairy dresses, he remembered suddenly. 

In the distance, people were calling for Wanda, the two syllables rising and falling like a song. _ Wan-da. _Another ten minutes of hard hiking and he spotted them: about four dozen people walking in long rows, sifting the brush in front of them with sticks. 

“Hello! Any news?” called out a beer-bellied man closest to him. Bucky left the trail and threaded his way through the trees until he reached him. 

“How can I help?” he wasn’t quite ready to whip out the notebook. 

“You can walk beside me here,” he said, “We can always use more people. Four eyes better than two, and all that,” They walked silently for a few minutes, his partner occasionally pausing to clear his throat with wet, rocky coughs. 

“Sometimes I think we should just burn these woods,” he said abruptly, “Seems like nothing good ever happens in them. You a friend of the Maximoffs?” 

“I’m a reporter actually. _ Chicago Daily Post?” _

He doesn’t know why it came out as a question. As if someone from Wind Gap would actually know a newspaper that no one in Chicago knew about. Wishful thinking. “Mmmm … Well houw ‘bout that. You writing about all this?” 

Suddenly, a wail shot through the trees, a girl’s scream: “Wanda!” His palms began to sweat as they ran toward the cry. He didn’t know what to expect when they actually got there. He’s seen his fair share of awful things, stuff that he ends up revisiting months after the fact only to be warded off with two mini-bottles of alcohol that were sold in the city like jellybeans in a jar. Thing was: he never actually saw a _ child’s _dead body while on the job. The thought made his stomach churn, his jaw tightening instinctively as if it would be enough to stop him from vomiting as soon as he got there. He saw figures tumbling toward them. A teenager with white-blonde hair pushed past them onto the trail, her face red and bundled. She was stumbling like a frantic drunk, yelling Wanda’s name at the sky. An older man, maybe her father, caught up with her, wrapped her in his arms and began walking her out of the forest. 

“They found her?” his friend called. 

A collective head shaking. “Girl just got spooked,” the other man called back, “Too much for her. Girls shouldn’t be out here anyway, not from how things have been lately,” The man looked pointed at Bucky, his face a changing phase of expressions before settling in disinterest and began sifting through the grass again. 

“Sad work,” Bucky’s partner said, “Sad time,” They moved forward slowly. He kicked a rusted beer can out of the way. Then another single bird flew by at eye level, then shot straight up to the treetops. A grasshopper landed suddenly on his wrist. Creepy magic. 

“Hey, can I ask your thoughts on all this?” he pulled out the small notepad from his back pocket, wagging it. 

“Don’t know I could tell you much,” 

“Just your thoughts. Two girls in a small town …”

“Well, no one knows these are related, right? Unless you know something I don’t. For all we know, Wanda will turn up safe and sound. Hasn’t even been two days, you know?” 

Bucky nodded. “Are there any theories about Lila?” he asked. 

“Some loony, some crazy man musta done it. Some guy rides through town, forgot to take his pills, voices are talking to him. Something like ‘at,” 

“Why do you say that?”

He stopped, pulled a package of chaw from his back pocket, buried a fat pinch in his gum line and worked it until he got the first tiny cut to let the tobacco in. The lining of Bucky’s mouth began tingling in sympathy. 

“Why else would you pull out a dead little girl’s teeth?”

“I’m sorry, did you say he took her _ teeth?” _

“All but the back part of a baby molar,” 

* * *

After another hour with no results and not much more information, Bucky left his partner, Harold Hogan (“write my nickname too, if you will: _ Happy _”) and hiked south toward the spot where Lila’s body was found last year. Took fifteen minutes before the sound of Wanda’s name drifted away out of earshot. Ten more minutes and he could hear Falls Creek, the bright cry of water. 

It would be hard to carry a child through these woods. Dragging her was out of the question since all of Lila’s wounds were inflicted posthumously and the ground was littered with branches and leaves, roots bumping up from the dirt. If Lila was a true girl of Wind Gap, a town that demanded the utmost femininity in its fairer sex, she’d have worn her hair long down her back. It would have tangled itself in the passing brush. He kept mistaking spiderwebs for glimmering strands of hair. 

The grass was still flattened along the point where the body was discovered, raked through for clues. There were a few recent cigarette butts that the idle curious had left behind. Bored kids scaring each other with sightings of a madman trailing bloody baby teeth. 

In the creek, there’d been a row of stones that had snagged the clothesline around Lila’s neck, leaving her tethered and floating the stream like the condemned for half a night. Now, just smooth water rolled over sand. Mr. Harold “Happy” Hogan had been proud when he told him: The townsfolk had pried out the rocks, loading them in the back of a pickup, and smashed them just outside town. It was a poignant gesture of faith, as if such destruction would ward off future evil and allow Lila’s spirit to rest in peace. Seems like it was all for nothing. 

He sat down at the edge of the creek, running his palms over the rocky soil. He picked up the flattest, hottest stone and pressed it against his cheek. He wondered if Lila had ever come out there when she was alive. Maybe the new generation of Wind Gap kids had found more interesting ways to kill summers, losing young children to Fortnight and Youtube. When he was a boy, they’d swim at a spot just downstream where huge table rocks made shallow pools. Crawdads would skitter around their feet and they’d jump for them, screaming if they actually touched one but then have it dissolve into nervous chuckles. No one ever wore swimsuits, it took too much planning. Instead you would just ride your bike home in soaked shorts and tanks, shaking your head like a wet dog before arriving within a mile of home. 

Occasionally, older boys equipped with shotguns and stolen beer, would stomp through on their way to shoot flying squirrels or hares. Bloody pieces of meat swung from their belts. Those kids cocky and pissed and smelling of sweat, aggressively oblivious of their existence, always compelled Bucky. His mother had tried pushing him towards those kinds of boys, going on and on about how it was natural for a boy to want to hunt, a primal need to provide just woven into their DNA that needed to be nourished. He didn’t like the thought of killing forest animals, not when Camille had them all in stuffed animal form on her bed and loved animals so dearly she would refuse to eat pork when in the presence of her Piglet toy. There were different kinds of hunting, of course. The gentlemen hunter with visions of Teddy Roosevelt and big game, who retires from a day in the field with a crisp gin and tonic, is not the hunter he grew up with. The other boys he knew, who began young, were blood hunters. They sought that fatal jerk of a shot-spun animal, fleeing silky as water one second then cracked to one side by their bullet. 

When he was still in grammar school, maybe twelve, he wandered into a neighbor boy’s hunting shed, a wood-planked shack where animals were stripped and split. Ribbons of moist, pink flesh dangled from strings, waiting to be dried for jerky. The dirt floor was rusted with blood. The walls were covered with photographs of naked women. Some of the girls were spreading themselves wide, others were being held down and penetrated. One woman was tied up, her eyes glazed, breasts stretched and veined like grapes, as a man took her from behind. It was the first time that Bucky realized he wasn’t like the other boys. There was dried semen in the wood of the shed, coated like paint in small splatters. Boys were suppose to want to look at naked women, grow hard at the mere sight of exposed breasts offered up towards them or their sex opened and ready to be taken. 

At home that night, he tried to masturbate to the memory of what the women looked like, but all it did was succeed in making his stomach churn painfully. It felt wrong. It felt like a lie he was forcing himself to accept. Eventually, he ripped his hand out of his boxers, pressed his face into his pillow, and cried himself to sleep. The next night, he tried again, this time with just the inch of male bodies from the photos in mind. He ended up throwing up in the bathroom both he and Camille shared after coming in his pants, panting and sick. 

* * *

Happy hour. It was the only time of day that might bring a smile to Bucky’s face — after about three glasses of rum and cokes. Besides, he needed to calm his nerves before he started his search for information back up. He stopped at Star’s, the town’s low-key country bar, before he has to be dropping by 1665 Grove Street, home of Laura and Clint Barton, parents of Katelin, twelve; Edith, eleven; the deceased Lila, forever nine; and six-year-old Nathaniel. 

Three girls until, finally, their coveted little boy. As he sat at the bar sipping his drink and staring at his reflection from behind the plethora of glass bottles, he pondered over the kind of desperation the Barton’s must’ve felt each time a child popped out and the daunting realization that the Barton family name will die with it’s last boy being Clinton Francis. Katelin was born first, not a boy, but sweet with rosy cheeks and a head full of dark locks. _ Oh well, _ they must’ve thought, _ we wanted two kids anyway, no matter the order. _ So, they scoured the baby naming websites and books for a name that was just as sweet as their new baby girl. Katie, but spelt Katelin to not be confused as being as ordinary as all the other Kates in the entire world. She got a closet full of frosting-cake dresses and an entire drawer dedicated to ribbons in girlie pastels. They crossed their fingers and chanted, “ _ Please, please, please,” _ when Laura was a month late, but still got Edyth, slapped with a family name after Clint’s dead mother. Now they were getting nervous, bitten fingernails down to the skin when Mrs. Barton got knocked up again. Her husband bought a baseball glove and laid it on her stomach as if the baby would absorb the inherit masculinity. Imagine the righteous dismay when Lila was born. She got saddled with a random name chosen from the first thing they both saw to their left — didn’t even get an _ h _to ornament it a bit. 

Praise the Lord for Nathaniel. Three years after the stinging disappointing Lila — Bucky wondered if he was an accident or one last shot? — Nathaniel was named after Clint’s female best friend, whether Laura thought too much about the relationship or not he was not sure. He was dotted on, and the little girls suddenly realized the extent of their unfortunate existence on their parents’ lives. _ Especially _Lila. No one needed a third girl. How sick is it that now she was getting the attention she sorely craved her entire life. 

Bucky took one last gulp of his drink, unclenching his shoulders, gave his cheeks a quick slap each, got into his big blue Buick, and wished for a third drink. This was the part he hated the most about his job. It ate at him having to go and invade people’s privacy, especially of those who are currently suffering a nightmare they can’t wake up from. It’s probably why he’s a second-rate journalist. One of them, at least. 

He still remembered the way to Grove Street. It was two blocks behind his old high school, which any kid within a seventy mile radius attended, yet still only had a graduating class of almost two hundred in 2012. Millard Calhoon H.S. was founded in 1930, Wind Gap’s last cough of effort before sinking into the Depression. It was named after the first mayor of Wind Gap, a Civil War Hero. Not the side you’d hope for, mind you, but still considered a hero in the eyes of the small conservative town in Indiana. Mr. Calhoon shot it out with a whole troop of Yankees in the first year of the Civil War over in Lexington and singlehandedly saved their town from becoming a part of the Union like the rest of the state. In school, they sang praise about the man who did everything in his power to defeat the enemy, though it was taboo to ever mention the fact that his wife was only thirteen years old and pregnant when he donned his gray uniform to the South. Everyone always got squeamish at the thought of them together. 

Calhoon himself died in 1929 as he closed in on his centennial birthday. He was sitting at a gazebo, which was now gone in favor of a big brass statue of him in it’s place, in the town square, which has since been paved over, being feted by a big brass band when suddenly he leaned into his fifty-two year old second wife and said, “It’s all too loud.” Then he had a massive coronary and pitched forward in his chair, smudging his Civil War finery in the tea cakes and spilling the pitcher of sweet tea all over the pristine white cloth. 

Bucky had a special fondness for Calhoon. Sometimes it _ is _all too loud. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Them, him, whatever. The motherfucker. The sick baby killer,” Barton snarled up at Bucky, his eyes watery and his jaw trembling, “While my family and I sleep, while you drive around doing your reporting, there’s someone out there looking for babies to kill. Because both of us know that the little Maximoff girl isn’t just lost,”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **WARNING: Descriptions of a dead child's body and a character has a little panic attack. **
> 
> This chapter is pretty heavy so if you don't want to read about the body, stop reading at _"The search party had agreed to meet up again at 6 a.m. to comb the woods all over again; he wanted to catch a quote from Phillips before the day began. Staking out the police station seemed a good bet. "_
> 
> Enjoy!

### TEETH

* * *

The Barton’s house was as much as Bucky expected, a late 70’s ranch house found at the border of town on the west side. It wasn’t cared for as it would’ve been in a more upscale neighborhood. The off-white paint on the exterior was peeling and dusty, and a post on the railing of the porch was crooked as if someone knocked into it and didn’t bother to fix it. 

As Bucky drove up, he spotted the front lawn full of sparkly pink bicycles littered on the crunchy brown grass. A couple of naked barbies, a dirty pink bucket hat. The only person he could spot from his car was a messy blond boy sitting on a Big Wheel that was for someone still in the thralls of toddlerhood and not a child old enough to know how to write his name in crayon with big wobbly letters. The boy grunted, pedaling hard but going nowhere as the wheel created a groove in the dirt. 

“Want a push?” Bucky asked in a sickly sweet tone the moment he closed the door of his car. The boy looked up at him with round eyes, frozen as if caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to. He stuck a dirt-caked finger in his mouth as his round belly popped out to greet Bucky. Nathaniel looked stupid and cowed. A boy for the Bartons, but a disappointing one. 

He stepped towards Nathaniel. The child jumped off the Big Wheel after a few tries when it clamped around him tight, only giving away when he whined pitifully and shoved his hands against it hard. 

“Daddy!” he wailed towards the screen door of the home as if Bucky had pinched him. 

The brunette sighed heavily. His stomach was doing somersaults by the time he was greeted at the door by a man that must only be Clinton Barton. A man with a face full of deep-set wrinkles and bags that made him look far older than he must’ve been. His nose looked to be two-times too big on his face with eyes that were almost obscured by the bags hanging on them. He reminded Bucky of Dugan, funnily enough. Barton opened the door a little to let the child inside, giving Bucky a brief glance at a miniature fountain gurgling in the hall. It had three tiers in shaped like shells, with a statue of a little boy perched on top. Even from where he stood, the water smelled old. 

“Can I help you?” 

“Are you Clint Barton?”

The man leaned back as if he was shocked. It was probably the first question the police had asked him when they told him his daughter was dead. 

“Yeah, I am. Who’s askin’?” 

“I’m so sorry about bothering you at home. I’m Bucky Barnes with the Chicago Daily Post,” 

Barton’s eyes started to gloss over, his body language starting to tense and grow aggressive. “Mmhmm,”

“We’re covering the story … about the missing girl. Wanda Maximoff and—”

“And Lila’s murder?”

Bucky swallowed thickly. He started to feel hot. He started to brace himself for screaming, door slamming, curses. Hell, Bucky found himself bracing for a dirty punch that misses his jaw and lands on the corner of his eye socket. Clint Barton stuffed his hands into his jean’s pockets, and looked down towards his boots as if he could wish him away. 

“We can talk in the bedroom,” 

He shoved the door open, turning his back quickly towards the journalist. It scared the shit out of Bucky when his foot kicked a toy firetruck, and he realized that the living room was cluttered with laundry baskets overflowing with rumpled sheets and tiny T-shirts. Then past the bathroom whose centerpiece was an empty roll of toilet paper on the floor, and down a hallway speckled with fading photos beneath grimy laminate: little blonde girls crowded dotingly around a baby boy; a young Barton with his arms stiffly circled around his new bride, each of them holding the edge of a cake knife; Barton again with his arm around a thin red-haired woman with a matching grin on her pale face; lots of photos of a thin red-haired woman. When he arrived to the bedroom — matching floral curtains and bedclothes, a big dark dresser — Bucky realized why Barton chose the bedroom to be the place for their interview. It was the only clean part of the house. 

Barton sat down on one edge of the bed, Bucky leaned against the dresser with his messenger bag over his thighs. There were no chairs. They could’ve been day players in an amateur porn flick. Bucky wanted to scoff; as if someone like Barton would be into gay porn. Bucky sipped the cherry — his hipbone itched — Kool-Aid that Barton fetched for them when they passed through the grease-stained kitchen. Barton, upon closer inspection, didn’t look as old as Bucky originally thought. He was clean shaven, a head full of dirty blonde hair, an athletic build hidden under a gray T-shirt and blue jeans. Bucky assumed he might be the sole reason for the order in the room; it had the unadorned neatness of a bachelor trying very hard. 

“Lila’d been riding her bike all last summer,” he started without prompting. He didn’t stop either when Bucky started fumbling for his iPhone to start recording the conversation, “She never had a bike of her own, so it was like a fuckin’ God-sent for her when Kate gave her her old one. All summer just around and around the block — my wife and I wouldn’t let her go any further. She was only nine. We are very protective parents. We always … always keep an eye on our kids, okay? But then at the end, right before school started again, my wife said fine. Lila had been whining, so Laura said fine, Lila could ride to her friend Cassie’s house. She never got there. It was eight o’clock before we realized ….” 

“What time had she left?”

“About seven? So somewhere along the way, in those ten blocks, they got her. My wife will never forgive herself. Never,” 

“What do you mean by they?” 

“Them, him, whatever. The motherfucker. The sick baby killer,” Barton snarled up at Bucky, his eyes watery and his jaw trembling, “While my family and I sleep, while you drive around doing your reporting, there’s someone out there looking for babies to kill. Because both of us know that the little Maximoff girl isn’t just lost,” 

He finished the rest of his Kool-Aid in one fatal swing, knocking it back like hard liquor while maintaining eye contact with the journalist. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The quotes were good, if over polished. Like it was practiced. Bucky found that common enough with the survivors of a tragedy. Not long ago, Bucky interviewed a woman who’s twenty-year old college student daughter had been murdered by her boyfriend, and she sighed unhappily, and gave him a line straight from a legal drama that Bucky happened to watch an episode of on Netflix just the night before: I’d like to say that I pity him, but now I fear I’ll never be able to pity again. There wasn’t a guide on how to react to something like murder, no one really prepared people for that. The only guidelines were from crappy TV dramas that think they’re deeper than they really are. 

“So, Mr. Barton, do you have any idea of anyone who would have wanted to harm you or your family by hurting Lila?” 

“Young man, I sell archery equipment for a living — over the Internet. I work out of my house, sometimes I go to an office in Bloomington to do some accounting. My wife teaches kindergarten at the elementary school all our kids attend. There’s no drama here. Someone just saw an unattended little girl and decided to kill our Lila.” He said the last part beleaguered, as if he’d given into the idea. 

Barton got up and stared out the window through the blinds, his eyes blinking rapidly. “Might be a homo did it,” he said. Bucky’s heart stopped a beat — like it always does whenever he hears the word spoken in that tone. He pushed down the panic. 

“What makes you say that?”

“Simple: he didn’t rape her. Everyone says that’s unusual when it comes to kids. I say it’s the only blessing the bastard gave us. I’d rather him kill her than rape her,” 

“Hold on,” Bucky said gently, “There were no signs of molestation?”

“None. And no bruises, no cuts, no sign of any kind of torture. Just strangled her. Pried her teeth out,” he paused, then turned around to look at Bucky, “And I didn’t mean what I said before, about her being better killed than raped. That was a stupid thing to say. But you know what I mean,” 

Bucky didn’t say anything, just nodded. A pregnant silence settled on them. Barton’s ice clinked in the empty glass, a baseball announcer’s voice being played next door. 

“Daddy?” A pretty dark haired girl, hair straight and shiny down to her waist, peeked through the crack of the bedroom door. 

“Not now, honey,”

“But I’m hungry,”

“You can fix something, can’t you?” Barton said, “There’s waffles in the freezer. Make sure Nate eats, too,”

The girl lingered a few seconds longer looking at the carpet in front of her, then nodded, and quietly shut the door. Bucky couldn’t help but wonder where her mother was. 

“Were you home when Lila left the house?” 

He shook his head with his mouth pressed tight into a line. “No, uh, I was on my way home from the grocery store. Laura needed some stuff for dinner. I didn’t hurt my daughter, if that’s what you’re asking,” 

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Mr. Barton,” Bucky lied, “I was just wondering if you got to see her that night,”

“Saw her that morning,” he said, “Don’t remember if we talked or not. Four kids in the morning can be a little much, you know?”

Barton twirled his ice, now melted into one solid mass. He ran his fingers under his nose. “No one’s been any help so far,” he said, “Phillips’ in over his head. There’s some bigshot detective assigned here from Brooklyn. He’s a kid, smug too. Sweet, though. Remembers that we’re also victims in all this. You want a picture of Lila?” He said picture like pitcher. So would Bucky if he wasn’t careful. You know what they say; you can take the boy out of Indiana, but you can’t take the Indiana out of the boy. Barton took his wallet out and pulled out a school photo of a girl with a wide, crooked smile, her pale brown hair cut jaggedly above her chin. 

“My wife wanted to put her hair in rollers the night before school photos,” Barton started with a fond smile, looking down as the photo as if seeing her as a gap-toothed toddler running around in braids, “Lila chopped it all off instead. She was a willful thing. A tomboy. I’m actually surprised she’s the one they took. Katelin’s always been the prettiest, you know? The one people look at,” he chucked, “Lila must’ve given hell,” 

As Bucky was leaving, Barton gave him the address of the friend Lila was going to visit the night she was grabbed. Maybe he hoped that Bucky could find something, anything that remained after a year of Indiana weather would give them a clue on who killed her. He still drove there slowly over a perfectly squared few blocks. The west side of town was newer, more polished than the rest of Wind Gap. It wasn’t like the dark, stiff, prickly stuff that grew in front of his mother’s house. That grass made better whistles. You could split the blade in the middle, blow, and get a tweezy sound until your lips began to itch. 

It would’ve taken Lila Barton five whole minutes to pedal over to her friend’s house. Add an extra ten in case she decided to take a more scenic route. Bucky guessed it was the latter. She would’ve wanted to stretch her legs, revel in the breeze as it rustled her hair, show off the bike that her sister no longer needed since she would soon graduate to a car in a couple of years. Nine was too old to be stuck pedaling in circles around the same block. What happened to the bike? 

Bucky rolled slowly past the home of Cassie Lang. As the sun set over the dry woods, Bucky could spot the silhouette of a girl run past a bright window. Her parents must tell all the other parents of the girls at school things like, “We hug her a little harder every night now.” Probably invented some elaborate excuse that Lila died because she didn’t wear a helmet, or that the boogeyman got her for not listening to her parents. Bucky bets Cassie wonders where Lila was taken to die. 

Bucky did. Yanking out twenty-something teeth, no matter how loose baby teeth were, no matter how lifeless the subject, is a tough task. He’d imagine it’d have to be done in a special place, somewhere safe so a person could take a few minutes to breathe now and then. 

Bucky looked over at Lila’s photo on his dashboard, the edges curling in as if to protect her. The defiant haircut and that grin reminded him of Wanda. He liked this girl, too. He tucked her picture away behind his phone case, hidden from the world where no one can harm her ever again. Then he pulled up the sleeve of his shirt and wrote her full name — Lila Nicole Barton — in inky blue ballpoint on the inside of his arm.

* * *

He didn’t pull into anyone’s driveway to turn around as he needed to. He figured people now weren’t too giddy about an unknown car pulling up in their driveways, even if it was just to perform a U-turn. So he turned left at the end of the block and took the longer way to his mother’s house. He debated whether to call her first to announce his arrival, but decided against it three blocks from home. It’d give her enough time to pretend they might’ve been gone on vacation. 

His mother’s massive house was at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can call it that. She lives in — and he once did too, so long ago it felt like another lifetime — an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top. It’s full of cubby holes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians needed a lot of room to stay away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. To his once childish imagination, it looked like a dollhouse brought to life. 

The house was at the very top of a very steep hill. You could either gamble driving your crappy car up to the carriage porch, or you could park at the bottom of the hill and walk sixty-three stairs to the top, a cigar-thin rail to the left your only safety line. When he was a child, he’s always walked the stairs up, ran the driveway down. He assumed the rail was on the left side going up because he’s left handed, and someone thought he might like that. Odd to think he ever indulged in such presumptions. 

He parked at the bottom, so as to seem less intrusive. Wet with sweat from the hike and the hot summer night, Bucky reached the top with a slight wheeze. He lifted up the drenched long hairs at the back of his neck, waved a hand at the skin, flapped his shirt a few times. Vulgar pit and back stains on his blue button-up shirt. He smelled, as his mother would say, ripe. 

The journalist rang the doorbell, which had been a cat-calling screech when he was very young, now subdued and truncated, like the bing! you hear on children’s records when it’s time to turn the page. It was 9:15, just late enough that they might have gone to bed. 

“Who is it, please?” His mother’s reedy voice behind the door. 

“Hi, Momma. It’s Bucky,” he plastered on a smile, lying to himself that it was completely fake. 

“James.” She opened the door and stood in the doorway, didn’t seem surprised, and didn’t offer a hug at all, not even the limp one he’d expected. She was adorned in a pink cotton nightgown that looked too fancy to be slept in, little white slippers, and her brunette curls draping over her shoulders in the rare occurrence when they’re not pinned up close to her face. “Is something the matter?” 

“No, Momma, not at all. Just in town for business,” 

“Business … business? Well, goodness, I’m sorry, sweetheart, come in, come in. The house is not up to par for a visitor, I’m afraid,” 

The house was perfect, down to the dozens of cut tulips in vases at the entry hall. It looked just like it used to when he was a child, the air littered with so much pollen that his eyes watered. Of course his mother didn’t ask him what kind of business possibly landed him there. She rarely asked about work. Once she claimed it was because his job was so upsetting, so dark that it weighed heavy on her heart and made her feel faint. That’s how it was for his mother. Everything was always too dark. 

“It’s fine, Momma,”

“Can I get you something to drink, James? George and I were just having amaretto sours out on the back porch,” She waved her glass in front of him, “I put just a little bit of Sprite in it, sharpens the sweet. We also have mango juice, wine, and sweet tea, or ice water. Or soda water, if you want something bubbly. I know you don’t drink much soda, not since high school when you started gaining all that awful weight, where are you staying?” 

It took a moment to get his head around what she was saying, he blinked. “Funny thing about that. I was hoping I could stay here? Just for a few days. I’ll be out before the end of the week,”

A quick pause, her long fingernails, a transparent pink, clicked on her glass. “Well, I’m sure that’s fine,” She picked up on of the greasy strand of Bucky hair, tucking it behind his ear as she stared at it instead of his face. He hated how he wanted to lean into her touch, “I wish you’d phoned. Just so I’d have known. I would have had dinner for you or something. Come say hello to George. He was thinking of you the other day,”

Bucky doubted that, but she started walking away from him, down the hallway — luminous white living rooms and sitting rooms and reading room blooming out on all sides — and he studied her. It was the first time they’ve seen each other in almost a year. His hair was different — long from short — but she didn’t seem to comment on it. She looked exactly the same, though, not much older than he was not, although she’s in her early forties. Glowing pale skin, and pale blue eyes. She was like a girl’s very best doll, the kind of dolls you don’t play with. She was twirling her amaretto sour without spilling a drop. 

“George, Jamie is here,” She disappeared into the back kitchen — the smaller of two — and he heard her crack a metal ice tray. 

“Who?” 

Bucky peeked around the corner, offered up another smile that was much more limp than the first one. “James. I’m sorry to drop in like this. I should’ve called,” 

You’d think a lovely thing like his mother was born to be with a big ex-football star. She would’ve looked right with a burly, mustached giant with a commanding presence. George, if anything, was thinner than his mother, with cheekbones that jutted out of his face so high and sharp his dark eyes turned to almond slivers. Bucky wanted to administer an IV whenever he saw him. He was overdressed as always, even for an evening of sweet drinks with his mother. All loafers and sweater vests, layers on layers. He didn’t even sweat. George was the opposite of moist. 

“James. It’s a pleasure. Always a pleasure,” he murmured in his monotone drawl, “All the way over to Wind Gap. Thought you had a moratorium on anything East of Illinois,”

“I’m here for work, actually,”

“Work,” he smiled. It was as close to a question he was going to get. Unlike his mother, George did have an intrigue for the macabre. His library was filled to the brim with books on the Civil War and World War I, always reading through them as if it were something easy to digest. Bucky remembered one time when George gave him an envelope with old Confederate money and an old rusty bullet. He looked proud of himself when Bucky opened it and faked a genuine love for it. He always suspected that George might be dying for any other male interaction, someone else to share the love of gruesome wars and gangrenous limbs. Camille used to like that stuff, too. 

His mother reappeared through the screen door with her hair now pulled up in a pale blue bow, Wendy Darling all grown up. She pressed a chilled glass of fizzing amaretto into his hand, patted his shoulder twice, and sat away from him, next to George. 

“Those little girls, Lila Barton and Wanda Maximoff,” he prompted, “I’m covering the story for my paper,”

“Oh, Jamie,” his mother hushed him, looking away in defeat. When his mother was upset, she had a peculiar tell: She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out. During some particularly difficult years when Bucky was a child, she had no lashes at all, and her eyes were a constant gluey pink. In the winter time, they leaked streaks of tears whenever she went outdoors. Which wasn’t often. 

“It’s my assignment,”

“Good Lord, what an assignment,” she said, her fingers hovering near her eyes. She paused, then scratched the skin just below and put her hand in her lap. “Aren’t those parents suffering enough without you coming here to copy it all down and spread it to the world? ‘Wind Gap Murders Its Children’! — is that what you want people to think?” 

“A little girl has been killed, and another is missing, Momma. It’s my job to let people know,” 

“I knew those children, James. I’m having a very hard time as you can imagine. Dead little girls … who would do that?” 

Bucky took a sip of his drink. Granules of sugar stucky to his tongue. He realized suddenly why he didn’t call or text ahead of time: He wasn’t ready to speak with his mother. His skin hummed. 

“I won’t stay long. Honest,”  
George refolded the cuffs of his sweater, smoothed his hands down the creases of his shorts. His only contributions of their conversations always came in the form of adjustments to his wardrobe. 

“I just can’t have that kind of talk around me,” his mother said, “About hurt children. You know how I feel about it. Just … don’t tell me anything about what you’re doing or what you know. I’ll pretend you’re here for summer break,” she traced the braided wicker of George’s chair with her fingertip. 

Bucky could feel her starting to retreat away, leaving him alone with George, so he shook his head to get the strand of hair out of his face and asked, “How’s Rebecca?” 

“Rebecca?” His mother looked startled, as if she suddenly remembered she forgot her child at the grocery store. “She’s fine, she’s upstairs asleep. Why do you ask?”

Bucky could hear footsteps scampering up and down the second floor — from the playroom to the sewing room to the hall window that gave the best spying vantage of the back porch. Rebecca was definitely not asleep, but he didn’t blame her for avoiding him. He’d avoid him too. 

“Just being polite, Momma. I bought her a souvenir from Chicago,” It was a cheesy “I Heart Chicago” shirt that wasn’t even brand new. He dug it out of his dresser when a voice in the back of his mind berated him for being a horrible older brother. Maybe it was also the fact that he knew that Camille would’ve asked him for something. The difference was that he doesn’t know Rebecca like he knew Camille. He smiled anyway, but his mother buried her face into her drink. Came back up pink and resolute. 

“Stay as long as you want, James, really,” she said, “But you will have to be kind to your sister. Those girls were her schoolmates, you know,” 

“I look forward to getting to know her,” he mumbled, “I’m very sorry for her loss.” He couldn’t help it. Thank God his mother didn’t notice the bitter spin on the words. 

“We haven’t touched your bedroom since you moved out. You’re more than welcome to stay there. The tub is still there. I’ll buy fresh fruit and some toothpaste in the morning. And steaks. Do you eat steak?”

* * *

Four hours of threadbare sleep. Shooting up in bed every twenty minutes, his head pounding so hard he wondered if it was the beating that woke him. He dreamt he was packing for a trip, then realized he’d laid out all the wrong clothes, such as sweaters for a summer vacation. He dreamt he’d filed the wrong story for Dugan before he left: Instead of the item on miserable Tammy Davis and her four locked-up children, they run a puff piece about Kylie Jenner’s favorite self-care products. 

He dreamt of a dying little girl, smiling at him as she ran away from him and dared him to catch her. He was laughing. Just before his hands touched her, the girl disappear into thin air and fell face first into the pavement. 

Just after 5 a.m. Bucky finally conceded and threw off the covers. He checked his phone for messages, only to find one notification from CNN and an automated spam text telling him about how he can help save the snow leopards for just the low, low cost of $20 a month. He got up and padded over to the bathroom where he washed off Lila’s name off his arm, but somewhere between dressing, brushing his still damp hair from his bath last night, and washing his face, he’d written Wanda Maximoff in its place. He decided to keep it for luck. Outside the sun was just rising, but his car handle was already hot to the touch. His face felt numb from the lack of sleep and he stretched his eyes and mouth wide, like a B-movie scream queen. He turned on his car and sat there for a moment, fishing out the old iPod Touch he kept tucked away in his glove compartment to start playing from the playlist of songs he’s heard millions of times before. The search party had agreed to meet up again at 6 a.m. to comb the woods all over again; he wanted to catch a quote from Phillips before the day began. Staking out the police station seemed a good bet. 

Main Street looked vacant at first, but as he got out of his car, he could see two people a few blocks down. It was a scene that made no sense. An older woman was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, legs splayed, staring at the side of a building, while a man was stooped over her. The woman was shaking her head maniacally, sobbing into her hand with wide eyes. Maybe it was a bad fall? Heart attack, maybe. Bucky didn’t even look both sides as he jogged across the street to help them, their staccato murmuring grew louder. 

The man, old and weathered, looked up at him with milky eyes. “Get the police,” he whispered, “And call an ambulance,”

“What’s wrong?” Bucky started, but a once-over towards where the woman’s eyes were glued had him dropping his phone towards the concrete of the alley. 

Wedged in the foot-wide space between the hardware store and the beauty parlor was a tiny body, aimed at the sidewalk. As if she was just sitting and waiting for them, brown eyes wide open. He knew those curls anywhere. But the grin was gone. Wanda Maximoff’s lips caved in around her gums in a small circle. She looked like a plastic baby doll, the kind with a built-in hole for bottle feedings. 

Her gums were pink and streaked with blood, dripping down her chin and onto her thighs. 

He threw himself back against the brick wall behind him, a shimmer of sweat quickly covering his skin. His legs started to tremble under him, his hands growing sticky from snot and tears that fell out of him like a fountain. His throat hurt, raw and aching, as if he were screaming. His heart thumped hard against his chest, pounding in his ears like a hammer pounding at nails. Images in meaningless flashes played before his eyes: The grimy rubber tip of the old man’s cane. _Camille’s ribbon on the pillow instead of pleated into her hair._ A pink mole on the back of the woman’s neck._ Camille staring up at the ceiling, lifeless, her body laying on the myriad of pillows on her hospital bed as if already prepped for an open casket._ The Band-Aid on Wanda Maximoff’s knee. Bucky could feel her name glowing hotly under his shirtsleeve. 

Then more voices, and Chief Phillips was running toward them with a man. 

“Goddammit,” Phillips grunted when he saw her. “Goddammit. Jesus,” he put his face against the brick of the beauty parlor, and breathed hard. The second man, about Bucky’s age, stooped down next to Wanda. A thick line of purple bruising circled her neck, and he pressed his fingers just above it to check for a pulse. A stalling tactic while he gathered his composure — the child was clearly dead. Big-shot detective from Brooklyn, he guessed, the smug kid. 

Bucky felt something being pressed into his hand, a warm palm pressing his fingers closed over his phone. The detective pulled him off the building gently, rubbing his shoulder blade as he moved past him to get to the woman. He was good, coaxing her out of her prayers and into a calm story of the discovery. The two were husband and wife, the owners of the diner whose name Bucky couldn’t remember the name of yesterday. Broussard. They were on their was to open for breakfast when they spotted her. They’d been there maybe five minutes before Bucky came along. 

A uniformed officer arrived, pulled his hands over his face when he saw what he’d been called for. 

“Jesus. Now I know what all that screaming was about,” Screaming? Who screamed? Bucky cleared his throat, and winced when it burned. Oh.

“Folks, we’re going to need you to head up with the station with the officer here so we can get some statements,” Brooklyn said. “Chester,” His voice had a parental sternness to it. Phillips was kneeling by the body, motionless. His lips were moving as if he might be prayer, too. Brooklyn repeated his name three times before he snapped back. 

“I heard you the first time, Steven. Be human for a second,” Chester Phillips put his arms around Mrs. Broussard and murmured to her until she patted his hand. 

Bucky was in a room the color of egg yolk for two hours while the officer got his story down. He doesn’t know how much of a story the officer got out of him. The whole time he kept thinking about Wanda’s body going down to the morgue, and how much he wanted to sneak in and put a fresh Band-Aid on her knee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, this book is pretty dark but! it's really good :) 
> 
> If you skipped the corpse bit, Bucky discovers the body of Wanda Maximoff and has a mini panic attack which reminds him of a traumatic experience as a kid. The police arrive and along with them is Steve, who Bucky remembers as the detective from Brooklyn. The police take him in for questions, in which Bucky withdraws into himself and thinks about how he wants to put a Band-Aid on Wanda's body.

**Author's Note:**

> I also took the liberty of lifting stuff directly from the book (A good 70%) but don't worry!! I'll be adding in my own stuff that won't make it sound like you're just reading the book. 
> 
> Follow me on tumblr @crvggio for updates and news relating to this or other of my fics!


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